Kitchen vs bathroom: which renovation adds more value to a Brisbane unit?

Every real estate agent in Brisbane will tell you kitchens sell homes. Every valuer will quietly mention bathrooms. Both are right and neither is: it depends who's buying your unit.

What we saw on our own jobs

We've prepped a dozen units for sale in the last two years. The pattern: a dated bathroom kills a deal faster than a dated kitchen does. Buyers will forgive a 2005 kitchen: they mentally budget a reno and move on. A bathroom with swollen vanity doors and cracked silicone makes them suspect everything else is rotting too.

Kitchens win on emotion, though. A sharp galley kitchen is the photo that stops the scroll on the listing. Our kitchen page shows what a $12k refresh buys versus a $20k rebuild.

The rough return on each

• Bathroom rebuild ($14-18k): typically recovers 70-90% at sale, plus faster sale time. On a tired wet room, it's the better first spend.
• Kitchen refresh ($9-14k): recovers 60-80%, but it's the listing photo that gets inspections booked. Harder to measure, impossible to ignore.
• Both together (Wet Rooms package, ~$22k): the combined effect beats either alone because the two worst rooms are gone from the buyer's objection list.

If you can only do one

Do the bathroom if it's visibly tired: mouldy silicone, cracked tiles, ancient vanity. Buyers price the risk of a leak at way above the real repair cost. Do the kitchen if the bathroom's fine but the whole place photographs badly, first impressions sell inspections.

A tired bathroom makes buyers suspect the whole apartment. A tired kitchen just makes them negotiate.

The third option nobody mentions

A clean repaint plus new floors covers more surface area than either room, usually for under $8k. On a rental-grade unit that's often the smartest dollar of all, our paint and plaster page has the numbers. Tell us your sale date and we'll tell you honestly which one's worth doing.